Organic Social Media Marketing for eCommerce Stores
Social media marketing is the promotion of items or services for eCommerce stores via social media. Stores can use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube etc, to platform their store and products globally.
‘Organic’ social media simply refers to the free content and opportunities, like posting, creating stories, polls, videos etc, that are available to everyone, including businesses and brands. Stores can use social media to promote themselves in a number of different ways.
Actively listing your products for sale on social media, creating posts promoting the sale of your products or advertising any discounts or giveaways are all successful ways in which businesses promote themselves online.
Creating a page or account for your store on Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok is one of the fastest ways to advertise your store. According to Kepios, 4.74 billion people use social media globally, amounting to 59.3% of the world’s population.
Social media marketing is by far the most effective way of spreading awareness of your store. The use of social media is also on the rise, meaning there’s never been a better time to platform yourself online. This form of marketing is particularly important for small businesses that struggle to make sales. A lot of small businesses don’t have actual stores, and so they rely on online platforming and advertising for all of their sales.
If you have a small business or work for a larger company whose social media marketing strategies could improve, be sure to keep reading for tips, statistics, and real success stories.
Social media marketing can come in two forms:
- Posting your own content in an attempt to receive more customers and sales.
- If you have the money and your business is a little more high-profile, you can pay social media platforms to advertise your business for you.
The Importance of Social Media Marketing For eCommerce
Social media marketing can help your store reach the global market. People from all across the globe spend hours scrolling on social media every day, so marketing your products and services on these platforms is more likely to reach a wide range of people than if you were to simply advertise your eCommerce store through local leaflets or word of mouth.
Don’t just take our word for it. Here are some statistics to prove it:
- 78% of sellers that use social selling methods are outselling their competitors who don’t. Social sellers come in all ages, but the majority of those maximising sales through social media are Gen Z or millennials. 63% of sellers claim that social media marketing is crucial for the survival of their businesses.
- In 2020, Instagram earned approximately $17.4 billion annually through mobile ad revenue, and social networks are forecasted to earn $130.2 billion from advertising.
- 90% of marketers have claimed that social media has helped the exposure, custom and sales of their businesses, so there’s no doubt that social media marketing is an effective tool to help your business succeed.
- Moreover, 49% of social media users aged 18-29 have claimed to have bought items after seeing them advertised on social media, so nearly half of social media members use these platforms to buy products.
Most social media platforms use an algorithmic system, meaning that the adverts that pop up while they’re using Instagram, Facebook, Twitter etc, will depend on their previous searches and other, similar stores, accounts and posts they’ve interacted with. Therefore, the people receiving your adverts or posts on their feeds are the ones most likely to be interested in your store and products. This is another reason why social media is a fantastic choice for marketing.
While social media marketing can be a brilliant way to platform your business globally and receive more annual sales, your success will depend on how you use social media to market yourself. Social media is home to millions of business accounts, all of which are most likely using the frequent usage of social media to their advantage. Finding online stores that promote their products successfully is a brilliant source of inspiration, especially if you’re new to all this. Let’s take a look at some of the brands who are successful in their use of social media as a marketing tool.
Brands That Use Social Media Efficiently
Boohoo
Despite receiving severe backlash for their fast-fashion approach to production, Boohoo has consistently received fantastic sales rates, partially due to how they utilise social media. They have been accused of breaching human rights laws within their manufacturing systems, as many of their products are made by desperate and poor employees for labour purposes. Investigations proved that these employees were significantly underpaid and working in unsafe conditions.
Despite all this, Boohoo’s sales have actually increased since the pandemic in 2020. This effectively demonstrates the power of social media marketing.
Boohoo creates partnerships with popular influencers and engages their audiences with entertaining, relatable and friendly content to help boost their sales. Boohoo’s Instagram account currently has 13.1 million followers, and some of their content is completely unrelated to Boohoo products.
Some of the reels and posts they’ve uploaded are just funny videos or memes referencing pop culture and celebrity news. For example, Boohoo posted this picture (left) of Kylie Jenner and her new son, captioned “Can’t cope with how big Baby Webster is already”, appealing to the wide Kardashian fanbase.
Similarly, they posted a meme of Stormzy (right) with humorous text to attract customers to their sale. By creating content like this, Boohoo attracts users to their accounts through humour and relatability.
After the customer is on the account, they’re more likely to buy products and invest somehow. Many of their posts are targeted at young women. They use predominantly popular female models like Hailey Bieber to sell their products and market relatability. This is an example of a company tailoring their marketing campaigns to their target audience.
Amazon
As the biggest eCommerce on the planet, there are a number of things Amazon does better than any other eCommerce business. Every day, they have millions of users shopping across the globe.
Amazon is a household name and has pretty much anything you could want on offer for a reasonable price, but one of the ways in which the company has combated these damaging revelations is through its digital marketing techniques.
On Instagram, Amazon partners with popular public figures, such as famous TikToker, Charli D’Amelio (left) and Sonya (@activecactus) (right), as pictured below. These figures receive products from Amazon, film themselves using them and get paid to promote their products.
On Twitter, Amazon takes a more humorous approach, using their iconic ‘smile’ boxes as the basis for memes and funny tweets like the ones below:
Like Boohoo, Amazon uses humour to attract as many customers as possible. The company aims to create relatable content and uses all social media platforms in order to do this.
How to Determine Your Brand Voice on Social Media
Thinking about what tone you want your business to be associated with is the first step. Whether you take the comedic approach like Boohoo or more sentimental methods like Dove, finding a vibe that suits your business is a great first step. By undertaking customer surveys and competitor analysis, you can find out what your customers respond best to and what type of people you’re targeting.
Additionally, you can use a user persona, which is a fictional character created to represent the type of customer you’re looking to attract. This should be generated based on your target audience, which will help you identify how and where to upload customized adverts and posts.
Put simply, your target audience will be the group of people that are most likely to buy your products. These people tend to be interested in similar things and will be attracted to stores in similar ways. Your target audience will tell you where you should be advertising your products and using what methods.
For example, if you make and sell children’s toys, your target audience will be parents with small children, who usually fall between the ages of 25 and 40.
Whereas, if your business specializes in men’s clothing, you’ll want to advertise your products to appeal to men. Using funny videos may appeal more to younger people or parents with children watching, whereas using simple photos and basic text may be more attractive to older users who aren’t interested in video promotion.
Your target audience should be your first port of call when deciding how and where to promote your business. Learning where your target audience spends their screen time is a great starting point. Most social media sites will give you a breakdown of the age and gender identification of your customers, so you can make your future promotions more customized.
Breakdown of Key Social Media Channels for Organic Social
With 2.934 billion users (as of July 2022), Facebook is the most used social network site across the board. However, the way in which these demographics are broken down will tell you whether you should be using Facebook as a predominant marketing platform or not. Here is a chart illustrating the demographic breakdown of Facebook’s users:
Members within the 25-34 age bracket are the most frequent users of Facebook but compared to other social media platforms like Instagram or Snapchat, Facebook has a higher percentage of users over the age of 45. If you’ve identified your target audience as men over 50, for example, Facebook may be a better site to platform your business.
Although Instagram has a lower amount of active monthly users at 1.22 billion, it is more frequently used by young adults than Facebook, so if your target audience fits in this bracket, you may want to choose Instagram as the site to do that.
Here’s a demographic breakdown of Instagram users:
By using Instagram to market on social media, you’ll be targeting 18–34-year-olds most effectively. Additionally, Instagram is a social media platform that has a growing rate of users, meaning the usership is likely to grow over time. This makes it more attractive as a marketing platform – the more users, the more potential buyers. Other platforms such as Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube are also great choices but require different types of marketing.
TikTok is a less popular social media site, with only approximately 755 million users globally. However, if you’re aiming to reach the younger population, for example, those below the age of 25, it’s a good choice.
Although finding the appropriate site to post on is a considerable factor in social media marketing, what is perhaps more important is the type of content each of these sites supports.
Types of Content for Each Social Platform
Facebook and Instagram support the same forms of content:
- Posts (although to post on Instagram, a photo is required)
- Stories
- Reels
TikTok and YouTube are video supporting services, with YouTube allowing longer video uploads and TikTok accommodating video uploads of up to 3 minutes.
Software to Make Social Media Marketing Easier
Research sites such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Zoho and Buffer. These sites are packed full of useful information to help you use social marketing techniques in more effective ways.
Additional services such as Brandwatch tracks usage and collects data across social media platforms. They can determine customer behaviours and trends to help businesses and influencers stay on top of the ever-changing popularity of videos, sounds, trends and products.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing for Ecommerce Businesses
Social media marketing has a bunch of benefits to help get your business noticed. Regardless of what you sell or where you’re based, social media is a free platform that can reach places all across the globe for maximum custom and sales.
These are the most important benefits of social media marketing that can help your business thrive:
- Business awareness – providing a global stage for your promotion
- Helps you add personal touches to the advertisement of your product
- Provokes conversation about your brand
- Helps you connect with your customers on a more personal level
- Helps you collect data about your audience so you can customize your products and advertisements to your target audience
- Easier contact between customer and provider
Effective eCommerce Tactics on Social Media
Depending on the site, you can use different tactics to get increased views. Here are a few examples:
- Using popular sounds or subscribing to trends will help you get noticed, if you’re looking to use TikTok as a marketing platform, this is an even more effective strategy. TikTok has ‘sounds’ that you can use in a video – if this sound is popular, your video is likely to get more views.
- Posting your positive reviews. Generating positive views can be achieved through fast delivery times, good quality products and responding quickly to customers.
- Giveaways and free prizes are a great way of increasing the number of users that interact with your site. You can promote competitions, using your products as a free reward. This will increase the number of people interacting with your account, and if you require users to share the post to their stories, your business will be platformed to all their friends and family too.
Final Thoughts
There are plenty of ways to use social media as a marketing tool, so make sure to do your research and find the best techniques that suit your business for maximum results.
Regardless of what you sell or who your target audience is, social media is a wide-ranging platform that can reach pretty much anyone globally. So, if you make sure to follow these tips, you’re likely to find an interested and loyal audience somewhere.
